A drama in five acts, first performed about 1611 and published in the First Folio of 1623 from an edited transcript, by Ralph Crane, of the author's papers. Like many of Shakespeare's other late plays, The Tempest tells of reconciliation after strife.

Although some scholars have speculated that Shakespeare wrote portions of The Tempest at an earlier stage in his career, most literary historians assign the entire play a composition date of 1610 or 1611. While Shakespeare may have had a hand in The Two Noble Kinsman (written a decade or so after The Tempest and assigned to dual authorship), The Tempest is customarily identified as the Bard's last stage piece. These marginal issues aside, The Tempest is the fourth, final, and the finest of Shakespeare's great and/or late romances. Along with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, The Tempest belongs to the genre of Elizabethan romance plays. It combines elements of tragedy (Prospero's revenge) with those of romantic comedy (the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand), and, like one of Shakespeare's problem plays, Measure for Measure, it poses deeper questions that are not completely resolved at the end. The romance genre is distinguished by the inclusion (and synthesis) of these tragic, comic, and problematical ingredients and further marked by a happy conclusion (usually concluding with a masque or dance) in which all , or most, of the characters are brought into harmony.

On a remote, deserted island, a powerful sorcerer named Prospero the rightful Duke of Milan lives alone with his fifteen-year-old daughter, Miranda, and his magical servants. Prospero was once the great Duke of Milan, a state in Italy. But twelve years ago, his brother Antonio and Alonso, the King of Naples, betrayed him, sending Prospero and the baby Miranda out to sea in a leaky boat. Antonio claimed the dukedom, and assumed that Prospero was dead. However, thanks to the help of a good-hearted counsellor named Gonzalo, Prospero and Miranda survived their ordeal. They eventually found themselves marooned on the island. Prospero is served on his island by Ariel, a spirit who he freed from a tree with magic, and Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax.

Now Fortune has brought Prospero a way to get his revenge on his brother and return himself and Miranda to the world of civilization. When a ship carrying his brother passes close by his island, Prospero summons up a storm, with the help of his swift, airy magical servant, Ariel. The ship is wrecked near the island, and with the help of Prospero's magic all its passengers are swept safely ashore.

The survivors make it to shore in scattered groups. The noblemen washed onto the island include Antonio; Alonso, the King of Naples, the good old counsellor, Gonzalo; Sebastian, Alonso's own power-hungry younger brother; and Ferdinand, Alonso's son, the Prince of Naples. When Ferdinand is washed onto the island alone, He is lulled to Prospero's abode by the singing of Ariel; Ferdinand and Miranda meet and fall in love at first sight--which was Prospero's secret goal all along, although he pretends to dislike Ferdinand at first. Meanwhile, Prospero lets the other noblemen--Alonso and Antonio, accompanied by Sebastian, Gonzalo, and others-- wander around the island for a while, by way of punishment. Alonso believes that his son Ferdinand has drowned, and he is suffering greatly over this.

Antonio and Sebastian, the wicked brothers of Prospero and Alonso, scheme together to murder Alonso in his sleep in order to seize the crown of Naples, but Prospero sends his servant Ariel to prevent this. Meanwhile, another of Prospero's servants--Caliban, a creature native to the island whom Prospero has made his slave--meets up with a couple of drunken servants from the ship, a jester named Trinculo and a butler named Stephano. Together, they plot tipsily to kill Prospero and take control of the island, even promising Miranda to Stephano. Ariel, however, reports all these goings-on to Prospero.

Prospero decides to make sport of Antonio and Alonso. He creates a magical banquet for the two men that vanish whenever they try to eat. He also sends Ariel in the guise of a harpy to hound them for their crimes against Prospero. Later, at a masque to celebrate the upcoming marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand, Prospero remembers Caliban's plot and abruptly calls the revels to a halt. He sends Ariel to punish them as well; the spirit does so by first luring them with some fancy clothes, then setting other island spirits upon them in the shape of hunting dogs that chase them around the island.

Finally, Prospero casts an enchantment on Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian to make them immobile with madness, guilt, and fear. Meanwhile, Ferdinand and Miranda become engaged, and Prospero uses his magic to give them a beautiful wedding pageant, with spirits taking the form of classical deities.

Finally, in the climactic concluding scene, all the characters are brought together once more. Prospero confronts his brother and Alonso, revealing his true identity as the rightful Duke of Milan. Prospero forgives the villains, but demands that Antonio restore his throne; he also rebukes Sebastian for plotting against his own brother. To Alonso, he reveals Ferdinand alive and well, playing chess with Miranda. Ferdinand and his father Alonso are reunited. As a final act, Prospero and Miranda plan to set sail back to Naples with the rest, where Miranda will marry Ferdinand and become the future Queen of Naples. Prospero abandons his magic and releases Ariel and Caliban from their servitude. From Ariel, Prospero asks for one last boon: calm seas and favourable winds for their trip back to Naples.

The play has a most interesting double focus, geographically speaking. Openly it is a story of Naples and Milan, a world of usurpations, tributes, homage's, and political marriages that is familiar in Jacobean tragedy. At the same time, the contemporary excitement of the New World permeates the play--a world of Indians and the plantations of the colonies, of the wonders and terrors and credulities of a newly discovered land. A lesser dramatist would surely have set his play far away in the west of the Atlantic to take advantage of this contemporary excitement. Perhaps with a surer theatrical instinct, Shakespeare offered his audience a familiar Italianate fictional world, within which contained glimpses of the New World.

No reading of The Tempest can do it justice: Shakespeare's tale of Prospero's Island is inherently theatrical, unfolding in a series of spectacles that involve exotic, supra human, and sometimes invisible characters that the audience can see but other characters cannot. The play, composed by Shakespeare as a multi-sensory theatre experience, with sound, and especially music, used to complement the sights of the play, and all of it interwoven by the author with lyrical textual passages that over-flow with exotic images, trifling sounds, and a palpable lushness.

The richness of The Tempest as theatre is matched by the extraordinary thematic complexity of its text. Recognizing it is not possible to discuss all of the themes and accompanying figurative strands of the play. It is possible to approach the play's topical highlights by first noting the salience of two themes that arise from the very theatricality of the play: the opposition between reality, illusion, and the tandem subject of the theatre itself. The play challenges our senses and is self-consciously a performance orchestrated by Shakespeare's effigy in the master illusionist Prospero. There are, in addition, numerous interpenetrating polarities in the play, most notably between nature and civilization or Art. These thematic strands come together at multiple points of intersection. Nevertheless, from one angle on the text, The Tempest asks a single question, one that Shakespeare had posed in many, and divers of his other plays: What is a human being? (alternatively, in Elizabethan terms: What is man?)